Tag: Nelson Mandela

“Mandela’s project was political; but it has implications for many parts of our lives: for friendship, marriage, child-rearing, being a good colleague, driving a car. And of course it also has implications for the way we think about what political success involves and what a successful nation is like. Whenever we are faced with pressing moral or political decisions, we should clear our heads, and spend some time conducting what Mandela (citing Marcus Aurelius) referred to as ‘Conversations with Myself’. When we do, I predict, the arguments proposed by anger will be clearly seen to be pathetic and weak, while the voice of generosity and forward-looking reason will be strong as well as beautiful.”

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I alight at Waterloo Station and head towards the autumn morning light. Commuters and workmen stand at the entrance, wreathed in smoke. Cranes overhead, still as sculpture. I wait for the colour green at a pedestrian crossing and pass under a railway bridge. Near the South Bank, I see vendors setting up their stalls for the day ahead. It is cold and bright. I ascend a flight of stone steps and encounter a bust of Nelson Mandela outside the Royal Festival Hall. The bronze likeness is set on top of a granite plinth, and bears the inscription “My Struggle Is My Life”. The artist, a political campaigner named Ian Walters, offered the work to the Greater London Council in 1984. It was unveiled in October 1985, and publicly disregarded by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons. When the original was destroyed by fire in an act of racism, a copy was created and unveiled in August 1988. At this time, Nelson Mandela was still serving a life imprisonment sentence for his resistance to South African apartheid, and would not be released until February 1990. I first came to know Nelson Mandela’s name in June 1998, when my grandparents went to see him during his visit to Cardiff; they waited for him outside the Park Hotel on the sixteenth of that month, where he shook their hand and exchanged greetings. My grandmother and grandfather always remembered their encounter fondly, and for years afterwards there was a dogeared copy of his memoir, A Long Walk to Freedom, on their living room bookshelf. It is quiet where I stand, and after a few moments looking at the sculpture I walk on.

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About

Rhys Tranter is a writer based in Cardiff, Wales. He is the author of Beckett’s Late Stage (2018). His writing has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2016, this website was selected to become part of the British Library’s permanent UK Web Archive. [Read More]

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